The present invention relates to an application switching method for a portable device, and more particularly to an application switching apparatus for a portable device which is not capable of multitasking.
Technological advances in portable information devices, such as a portable telephone, PDAs, and the like, allow the devices to perform many functions such as gaming, digital photography, audio reproduction and communications such as internet connection and many other functions. Therefore, the portable devices have become multi-functional devices and have many uses.
Therefore, a user may want to use multiple applications at the same time. Previously, a multitasking operating system had been used to launch multiple applications at the same time where all the applications are managed as a separate task. Thus, when a user wanted to switch to a different application, it shall effectively be a task switch, to display the other application.
The problem with this approach was that there was a lot of overhead required, as each application is defined as a task. Application development and maintenance was cumbersome because it required in-depth knowledge of the processing environment so development costs increased. Also, runtime costs were greater because a more complicated operating system was required. This lead to a cumbersome user interface, longer booting and shutdown times of the devices due to lengthy operating system initialization and shutdown, and more battery power consumption. There were also higher manufacturing costs, managing more tasks in memory required more memory, a more complicated operating system like Symbian involves more licensing costs, and more MIPS (millions of instructions per second) required.
As such, there is a need for an framework for application switching that provides the user the ability to launch many applications simultaneously and allows multiple applications to launch in a single task that keeps running costs and development costs low but allows users to switch between multiple applications on a device.